Huge Archive of Conspiracy bittorrents

This is an oddly diverse collection of videos, ebooks, and mp3's. There's Paris albums, Michael Moore movies, lots and lots of paranoid NWO/Illuminati ramblings, UFO stuff, and yes, there are unfortunately a couple of creepy right-wing "zionist bankers that control the world" type theories featured here. Whoever maintains the archives doesn't seem to favor any of these theories over the others though. I suspect he/she is probably just cataloguing the wierdness. In any case there's loads of cheap entertainment available here, if, like me, you get a kick out of watching 40-year old balding guys who live in their parent's basements explain their pet theories about UFOs and the New World Order.

myBio dolls

myBio dolls are a collection of educational dolls exploring the emergence of biological hybrids in biotechnologies, and our moral, social, cultural and personal responses to the strange and different in human biology and also "transhuman" creatures.

The use of narrative and myBio dolls can help children understand how to deal with applications of biotechnology, and with the social development of biotechnological knowledge. Tomorrow’s children will need to know the key methods used in biotechnology so they can learn to understand the many ambivalent possibilities of biotechnology.

Starting with a series of "What if" stories, the narrative process gives children a common language for talking about biotechnology. "Suppose that your life could be saved by a pig, what would happen to you and the pig?" or "Imagine you could have a glow-in-the-dark rabbit, would you relate to such a rabbit differently than a conventional one?"

Gangs use voodoo in Nigeria sex trade

ATHENS, Greece (AP) -- If she runs away from her life of prostitution, her parents will become sick and die.

At least that's what this Nigerian woman believes. The threatened curse, she claims, was part of a voodoo rite performed in her homeland just weeks before she was brought to Greece by a prostitution ring.

"I have no doubt in its power," says the petite 24-year-old, who goes by the alias of Maria and described being forced into seven-night-a-week duty at a flophouse brothel on an Athens back street. "Even if I had a doubt, how could I risk the life of my mother and father?"

Cheap D.I.Y. Water Filtration Tech

I love this sort of thing. This is an excellent example of dirt-cheap, easily made, and extremely useful technology. Clean water is already an extremey scarce and valuable resource in much of the world today, and there is every indication that this situation will worsen dramatically in the near future.This type of technology could help mitigate potentially violent conflicts over control of the world's clean water supplies. It could also help control any number of the diseases that are caused primarily by impure water source that kill huge numbers of people daily. Plus it's made using cow shit, matches, coffee grounds, and clay! Here's a link to a PDF about the filter with a step by step illustration of the process, and heres a link to an interview with the inventor.

Wired Magazine Article on Garage Biotech

Damn straight:

The era of garage biology is upon us. Want to participate? Take a moment to buy yourself a molecular biology lab on eBay. A mere $1,000 will get you a setof precision pipettors for handling liquids and an electrophoresis rig for analyzing DNA. Side trips to sites like BestUse and LabX (two of my favorites) may be required to round out your purchases with graduated cylinders or a PCR thermocycler for amplifying DNA. If you can't afford a particular gizmo, just wait six months - the supply of used laboratory gear only gets better with time. Links to sought-after reagents and protocols can be found at DNAHack. And, of course, Google is no end of help.